him to Scandinavianism, Pan-Germanism, and cosmopolitanism,--all this in its peculiar combination in him is so markedly national, that his personality may be said to offer a _résumé_ of the entire people. None of his contemporaries so fully represent this people's love of home and of freedom, its self-consciousness, rectitude, and fresh energy. Indeed, just now he also exemplifies, on a large scale, the people's tendency to self-criticism, not that scourging criticism which chastises with scorpions, and whose representative in Norway is Ibsen, in Russia, Turgenief, but that sharp, bold expression of opinion begotten of love. He never calls attention to an evil in whose improvement and cure he does not believe, or to a vice which he despairs of seeing outrooted. For he has implicit faith in the good in humanity, and possesses entire the invincible optimism of a large, genial, sanguine nature. According to his character, he is half chieftain of a clan, half poet. He unites the two forms most prominent in ancient Norway: that of the warrior, and that of the skald. In his intellectual constitution he is partly a tribune of the people, partly a lay preacher; in other words, he combines, in his public demeanor, the political and religious pathos of his Norwegian contemporaries, and this was yet more apparent after he broke loose from orthodoxy than it was before. Since his so-called apostasy, in fact, he has been a missionary and a reformer to a greater degree than ever. He could have been the product of no other land than Norway, and far less than other authors could he thrive in any but his native soil. In the year 1880, when the rumor spread through the German press, that Björnson, weary of continual wrangling at home, was about to settle in Germany, he wrote to me, "In Norway will I live, in Norway will I lash and be lashed, in Norway will I sing and die." To hold such intimate relations with one's fatherland is most fortunate for a person who is sympathetically comprehended by this fatherland. And this is the case with Björnson. It is a matter dependent on conditions deeply rooted in his nature. He who cherishes so profound an enthusiasm for the reserved, solitary Michael Angelo, and who feels constrained, as a matter of course, to place him above Raphael, is himself a man of a totally different temperament,--one who is never lonely, even when most alone (as he has been since 1873 on his _gard_ in remote Gausdal), but who is social to the core, or more correctly speaking, a thoroughly national character. He admires Michael Angelo because he reveres and understands the element of greatness, of profound earnestness, of mighty ruggedness in the human heart and in style; but he has nothing in common with the great Florentine's melancholy sense of isolation. He was born to be the founder of a party, and was, therefore, early attracted to enthusiastic and popular party leaders, such as the Dane